That’s a good question. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note remains below 2%, leading some to predict that investors will remain focused on dividend-paying stocks in 2015.

It h also led MarketWatch.com’s John Coumarianosweighed in recently that income-hungry investors that are shuttling money that should be allocated to bonds into high-yield stocks may be courting disaster.

That’s an argument for another time and another blog post.

But for dividend investors where can they look? Perhaps financial stocks.

Granted, names sensitive to interest rates and exposed to the impact of falling oil prices on the energy companies to which they have loaned money have lagged the broader market so far this year. But Keefe Bruyette & Woods strategists Frederick Cannon and Matthew Dinneen argue that ”the good news about financial stocks is that there are numerous high-yield opportunities in the space which we believe are likely to perform well in a low-yield world.” As Cannon and Dinneen write:

KBW’s Financial Sector Yield Index (KBWD), against the S&P and an index of overall financial stocks. As shown, the KBWD has performed almost as well as the S&P and significantly outperformed the index of financial stocks. This is not surprising given the decline in interest rates and interest rate expectations this year. It is somewhat surprising that high-yielding financials have not outperformed the overall market given its higher yield. We suspect that this may be due to the market bias against financial stocks generally and may offer investors an opportunity to buy high-yielding financial stocks before a rally…We believe that a well-diversified portfolio of high-yielding stocks should show strong performance in 2015 assuming bond yields remain depressed.

Dividend stocks, almost by definition, tend to not offer investors much capital appreciation potential to go along with their rich cash payouts. That’s because companies that pay out a lot of cash tend every quarter to shareholders tend not generate big amounts of revenue growth.

According to The Street, the financial website, that doesn’t mean investors “can’t have the best of both worlds, if they know where to look.”

For example, integrated oil and gas company ConocoPhillips, which has boosted its bottom line despite production headwinds, is not letting weak oil prices deter it from its long-term goals. In the most recent quarter, Conoco grew net income by 8% year over year and grew earnings per share by 8.5% year over year.

The company also gave guidance that its fourth-quarter production would grow to between 1.54 and 1.57 million barrels of oil equivalent, a sequential improvement of more than 3% if the low end of the guidance range is met. That tops the 1.49 million barrels delivered in the third quarter.

“ConocoPhillips is a top dividend stock to watch out for in 2015,” writes Richard Saintvilus of the Street. “Of the 19 analysts offering a 12-month price target, ConocoPhillips has a high target of $108 and a median target of $81, which suggests a potential stock price premiums of 54% and 15%, respectively.”

Outside of the energy sector, dividend investors should consider a tech giant like Microsoft (MSFT) (up 28.25% year to date), which pays a yield of 2.58%.

“That yield is likely to climb in the years ahead,” adds Saintvilus. “That’s because under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has been revitalized in 2014, growing revenue at almost 12% in the past year. Analysts expect profits to grow at a rate of 10% in the next five years.”

With its current yield of 2.58%, Microsoft is a growth company that’s also paying above-average income.

Finally, PG&E , which is up 35.20% in 2014, is another strong dividend payer to watch in 2015, according to the Street. (The San Francisco-based company is one of the largest combined natural gas and electric utilities in the U.S.)

With a yield of 3.31%, PG&E has also become a growth stock. writes The Street, with revenue jumping 18.2% year over year in the most recent quarter — beating estimates by $260 million. “With shares trading at around $54, PG&E is still cheap. The stock is trading at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 18, almost two points lower than the average P/E of companies in the S&P 500. And the P/E drops two points lower on a forward-looking basis,” The Street adds. ” with revenue and profits growing at impressive rates, the stock could reach $62 in the next 12 to 18 months, yielding possible gains of 10% or more.”

Since Windstream [WIN] shook up telecom valuations by spinning off assets into a real-estate investment trust, things have gotten so wacky that the historically high-yielding CenturyLink [CTL] yesterday saw its dividend yield fall below that of staid telecom stalwart AT&T [T]. Morgan Stanley says yesterday’s 5.31% closing yield for AT&T marked the first time it yielded more than CTL (5.30%) since CTL established its high payout policy back in 2008, saying the market “has generally demanded a higher yield from the RLEC space than from the Bells to compensate for the lower growth prospects.” And in fact T’s yield slipped back below CTL’s yield on Tuesday.

Looking ahead, Morgan Stanley says CenturyLink is seen as more likely than AT&T to consider (and benefit from) a REIT spinoff similar to what Windstream did. AT&T is a bit cheaper in P/E terms, but CenturyLink offers nearly double the free cash flow yield. But on balance Morgan Stanley sees more upside in AT&T:

While we rate both stocks Equal-weight, we have modest 4% upside to our AT&T base case of $36, while our CenturyLink base case valuation is $37 (-9%, or 4% total one year return net of dividends). We see several factors driving the relative performance in coming weeks: 1) Progress of wireless wars, as Sprint and others tweak pricing ahead of the iPhone 6 rollout, 2) Spectrum auctions, particularly AWS-3 in November where AT&T is expected to be active, 3) REIT rollout, as investors, regulators and others digest Windstream’s actions further.

Income investors seeking better yields than bonds offer these days, take note. Citi equity researchers today updated their “Global Bond Refugees” screen, which they came up with last year to help investors dissatisfied by low bond yields but wary of stock volatility. Citi says its list highlights bond-like stocks with “premium” dividend yields and low drawdowns – a measure of price volatility – at a time when bond yields are still low by historical standards and stocks yield more than government bonds in all major DM markets outside the US. Here’s Citi explaining its methodology:

We screen the 500 largest (by market cap) stocks from the MSCI AC World Index with dividend yield at least 10% premium to the market, where the drawdown over the previous three years was in the lowest quintile and where the company has not been a net issuer of stock over the previous three years.

Citi says the global screen results in 28 companies that are tilted towards defensive stocks, with Consumer Staples, Health Care and Telecoms emerging as the most represented sectors. Here are the 16 U.S companies that make the cut, listed with their 12-month trailing dividend yields (each at least 2.7%):

Citi Private Bank is out with its mid-year investing outlook, and it tells income investors to expect U.S. bond yields to continue rising during the second half of this year and into 2014, estimating that Federal Reserve easing programs have artificially depressed the 10-year Treasury yield by around 100 basis points. From Citi:

Getting the exact timing right for a rise in interest rates has always been challenging. It is no different this time around, particularly since a number of economic and geopolitical headwinds ensure that the move to higher rates will not be linear. Indeed, investors who hedge or seek to profit from higher rates could risk being too early should economic prospects fall short of what we expect.

In our view, though, the softer growth of the first half 2013 in the US is temporary, and economic momentum will accelerate later this year. Thus, the risks of not hedging portfolios or floating rate liabilities for a higher US rate climate currently outweigh the costs.

Citi urges investors to favor credit risk (lower-grade bonds) over interest-rate risk (longer-dated, higher-rated bonds that are more sensitive to rising rates), to diversify sources of yield and to consider floating-rate investments. Citi also offers an entire section on “Identifying Sustainable Yield,” saying investors should start with core “yield staples,” including both high-grade and high-yield U.S. corporate bonds, emerging market sovereign bonds, master limited partnerships and dividend-paying stocks. It says investors can then look to yield supplements, which it describes as “less conventional, less liquid strategies” and include closed-end mutual funds, non-agency mortgage-backed securities and structured products.

And here’s Citi’s take on dividends-paying stocks:

As higher interest rates are expected, the tailwind for dividend stocks will abate — even as regions differ. However, dividend income is no fad. Over long periods, compounded dividend income has provided roughly half of equity total returns — a fact lost on many short-term-oriented investors. We view the consistent paying and increasing of dividends as signs of a healthy company, and while the composition of our portfolios might be in store for some change as the economic outlook evolves, we continue to feel that a focus on both dividends and growth is warranted even after the strong run over the past couple of years.

Income just keeps getting harder to find from any investment source. Justin Lahart is out with a Heard on the Street column in today’s Wall Street Journal looking at the losses suffered by some exchange-traded funds that focus on dividend-paying stocks over the past couple of weeks, as bond markets fell sharply following some mixed messages from the Fed:

The bond-market selloff… sent the yield on 10-year Treasurys up to the highest level in over a year—and that has weighed on dividend-paying stocks. For example, the iShares High Dividend Equity ETF (HDV) has declined 2.3% since Mr. Bernanke made his comment, versus 1.7% for the S&P 500.

The column, which also cites the Vanguard High Dividend Yield, (VYM) the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation (VIG) and the SPDR S&P Dividend (SDY) ETFs, says investors face the biggest risk because of significant overlap in the holdings of such ETFs:

A recent Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) analysis identified 20 companies with the biggest share of market float, or publicly available shares, held by dividend-focused ETFs. These ranged from Cincinnati Financial, (CINF) where ETFs control 4% of the float, to Pitney Bowes (PBI) (which recently announced it will slash its dividend) at 15%.

An equal-weighted index of these stocks was up 21.7% on the year as of May 21, the day before Mr. Bernanke spoke. Since then, it has fallen 3.4%, twice as fast as the market overall. Crowded trades are less fun when people are crowding out.

This blog spent much of the past couple of weeks following the broad bond-market selloff and its ramifications for other income markets, namely how mortgage real-estate investment trusts got absolutely hammered last month, with popular mREITs Annaly Capital Management (NLY) and American Capital Agency Corp. (AGNC) losing 14.2% and 21.9% respectively, while the iShares FTSE NAREIT Mortgage PLUS Capped Index Fund (REM) lost 10.8%. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Cheng looks back at a month that saw a sharp climb in U.S. Treasury yields lead to a sharp selloff in REITs and other dividend-paying equities that investors had previously been stockpiling as alternatives to low-yielding bonds:

Hardest hit were utilities, telecommunications stocks and real-estate investment trusts, all of which had benefited from the Federal Reserve keeping government-bond yields at rock-bottom levels…. A continued swift rise in bond yields could mean a continued retreat from dividend-paying stocks as investors decide they are getting a better deal in safe government debt…. REITs, which pay out 90% of their income as dividends, have also seen a sudden reversal of fortune….

Homebuilders have also felt the pain, as the nationwide interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose to 3.81% last week, its highest in a year, according to Freddie Mac (FMCC). The increase in mortgage rates, which are closely tied to Treasury rates, helped send shares of home builders Lennar Corp. (LEN) and Toll Brothers Inc. (TOL), down 8.1% and 7%, respectively, last week. Those losses came despite data showing nationwide home prices in March jumped 10.2% from a year earlier, the biggest gain since 2006.

The story notes that the next real test for stocks and bonds alike will be the May’s U.S. employment report, which the Labor Department will release Friday and which could lead to a clearer indication of how close the Federal Reserve is to dialing back its bond-buying programs.

Citi is out with its monthly list of CDS-adjusted dividend-paying stocks, which Citi says “looks for stocks with high dividend yields but also solid prospects according to the CDS market.” To recap: Citi picks global stocks with a market cap above $10 billion and a dividend yield at least 1.5 percentage points higher than median-yielding stocks. Citi filters these for companies with credit-default swap spreads under 100 basis points (the lower the CDS, the lower the perceived credit risk).

The February list still skews a bit toward Europe and comprises 69 companies (unchanged from January), with a 4.7% average yield (down from 4.8%) that Citi forecasts will grow by 4% in 2013 and an average CDS of 62 bps (unchanged). The screen remains overweight global defensive stocks and underweight financials, which the CDS market still regards as risky, although Citi says the weighting of the financial sector has been growing since mid-2012.

There are 26 U.S.-based companies, unchanged from last month. Pfizer (PFE), which seemingly jumps in and out of the list on an every-other-month basis, falls off this month’s list, after rejoining the list last month, and First Energy (FE) follows suit. AbbVie (ABBV) and Raytheon (RTN) join the list this month. Herewith the latest full U.S. list:

Citi is out with its newest monthly list of high dividend-paying stocks screened for companies that get top marks in the credit-default swaps market, which this blogger and his corporate credit background see as a pretty clever method for selecting quality dividend stocks.

The rules: Citi picks global stocks with a market cap above $10 billion and a dividend yield at least 1.5 percentage points higher than median-yielding stocks. Citi filters these for companies whose credit-default swap spreads are currently under 100 basis points (the lower the CDS, the lower the perceived credit risk).

The latest list still skews a bit toward Europe and comprises 69 companies, up from 61 last month, with a 4.8% average yield that Citi forecasts will grow by 4% in 2013 and an average CDS of 62 bps. The screen remains overweight global defensive stocks and underweight financials, which the CDS market still regards as risky.

There are 26 U.S.-based companies, up from 21 last month. Pfizer (PFE) and Reynolds American (RAI) returned to the list, along with newer entrants including, Equity Residential (EQR), Kraft Foods (KRFT), FirstEnergy (FE) and Waste Management (WM). Mondelez International (MDLZ) fell off the list. Herewith the latest full list of U.S. companies:

BlackRock – which by its name presumably knows a thing or two about craggy, gloomy precipices – is out with a new report assessing the investing landscape in the aftermath of the not-so-grand compromise that averted the dread fiscal cliff. Herewith, in three strata, we offer BlackRock’s exploration of some of the bedrock elements of post-cliff income investing, courtesy of its global chief investment strategist, Russ Koesterich:

We believe dividend stocks look attractive. While dividend tax rates will increase for some taxpayers, the deal should not have a significant effect on dividends. The change in tax treatment is quite modest and will only impact a small percentage of taxpayers. In any case, US companies have a history of making investors whole on an after-tax basis. With current payout ratios near historic lows and balance sheets quite strong, companies have ample room to raise dividend payments to compensate investors for any changes in tax treatment.

Regarding fixed income, we believe that slower growth levels imply that Treasury yields will stay low for at least the first half of 2013. Treasuries, however, still look unattractive to us. Real yields are negative and duration risk is high, which means even a modest increase in yields would have a significantly negative impact on Treasury prices. We suggest investors focus on credit sectors of the fixed income market, with a particular emphasis on high yield, bank loans, structured credit (including commercial mortgage backed securities, collateralized loan obligations and non-agency mortgages) and emerging market debt.

Finally, we believe municipal bonds remain competitive on a tax-adjusted basis for US investors. Higher marginal rates for at least some investors, along with little prospect of changes to municipal bonds’ tax status, make munis even more attractive on an after-tax basis. While we are unlikely to see significant capital appreciation from municipal bonds, their after-tax yields are attractive and munis remain a solid source of income.

Amey Stone is Barron’s Income Investing blogger and Current Yield columnist. She was formerly a managing editor at CBS MoneyWatch, MSN Money and AOL DailyFinance. Her responsibilities included overseeing market coverage and personal finance topics. Prior to those roles, she was a senior writer at BusinessWeek where she authored the Street Wise column online and contributed to the magazine’s Inside Wall Street column. Topics covered included economics, corporate finance, Fed policy, municipal bonds, mutual funds and dividend investing. She co-authored King of Capital, a biography of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.